1

1966

 

FOR MONTHS AFTER Richard first visited Horsehead Crossing—he had been sent by his employer in Houston to explore the largely worked-over oil and gas deposits in the Permian Basin near Odessa—he would dream nightly of what he had seen: the salt-preserved skulls of thousands of horses and cows tipped up in the saline banks of the Pecos, and in the surrounding, shifting sand dunes—horse and cattle skulls trapped in the sand and silt like the pale fossils of the limestone cliffs above.

Richard would awaken nightly to the dream of being amidst those churning horses, fighting the river’s fierce current, trying to make the crossing at the only possible spot for a hundred miles in either direction. He would dream also of trying to push the maddened cattle across, their legs and horns entangled. In the dream, the herd tipped sideways in the current, thrashing and goring one another and choking on the terrific waves of their own making, the sunlight disappearing beneath the frothing waters, with thousands of pounds of wild horses or cattle riding atop the backs of others, pushing the others down deeper.

Then the chain of animals would begin to break into tatters, like an ice floe swirling in loosening fragments downstream, with most of the cattle or horses drowned now, drifting into eddies along the banks, where later that night, after a good day’s heat, they would begin to swell, and would line the night-dark shores like the whitened bellies of so many dead fish.

Too often, in the dream, Richard would find himself beneath the darkened mass of animals in the river crossing, surging with the other animals, trying to find air and sunlight but unable to. Though other times an opening would appear, and he would move quickly up to that clearing of light, would get his head above the water, and would survive; and he would know with exquisite, shining relief the feeling of his hand clutching the far and stony shore. He would pull himself out, drenched and battered, back out onto the land, safely across, along with the rest of the herd, or what remained of it.

There were human bones all up and down the Pecos too, and back among the sand hills. The sand dunes flowed and shifted with the unpredictable movement of a creature pacing across the land, towering dunes of white sand appearing one morning outside an unfortunate homesteader’s window, where none had existed for fifty years before.

Richard had never found an entire human skull out in the dunes, but had found pieces of skull, and arrowheads too, and broken arms and bones of his fellow kind. He carried some of the loose bones back to the drilling rig where he had been working at the time. He did not protest when some of the older roughnecks entertained themselves by building a small log-cabin structure out of the bones, which was disassembled later that night by the workers’ dogs, who scattered the bones and clacked on them steadily for the next several days; and for days beyond that, the desert was littered with the scat and offal of the dogs, in which the white cracked pieces of human bone were discernible, like nuts or seeds undigested.

Once atop the desert, on the stone reef overlooking the flatlands below, Richard would find in his wanderings the prehistoric grinding basins, as deep and circular as if cut with posthole diggers, where people had sat across the centuries, grinding roots and nuts at bluff’s edge while staring out at the depths and the void beyond.

It seemed to Richard then, even in the midst of his careless youth, that he could feel their presence, thick and dense along the cliff’s walls, still seated around those empty grinding basins—as if the grinders had stepped away for only a moment, or as if they might be returning, having merely not yet shown up for that day’s waiting work—and he moved carefully around the holes, careful not to bump into any of the ghosts, which seemed to him to be everywhere.

Something about being up there on top of the fossiled reef, so much closer to the sky, and with all of West Texas spread beyond—something about the dryness of the heat, and whiteness of the limestone caprock on which he walked, and the pale blue of the sky above—made him crave sex even more than the general background steadiness of his youth demanded; and sometimes he would bring girlfriends out to Castle Gap, to stare out at that horizon, and to spend the night, to bear witness to the sunset, and the stars that night, beside the windy campfire, and to the sunrise the next morning, and to the glories of each other’s bodies in the warmth of the next day.

Other times, however, alone, he would wander the shifting, swirling dunes below, with the fortress wall of the reef above like some outpost sentinel or surveyor.

Strangely enough, there was water out in the dunes—remnant fresh water from millions of years ago, both trapped and transported in mysterious unmappable lenses of sand that changed nightly, daily, beneath the hot scouring breath of the wind.

Richard had occasionally come across such sparkling water. There would almost always be colorful songbirds gathered around these brief blue puddles, and surprised by Richard’s approach, the birds would leap away on a whirring of wings, water splashing from their wetted beaks and feet and wingtips, differentiating for him the mirage ponds from the real ones—and always, in such moments, Richard would be reminded, with longing, of kisses.

He would crouch at the water and drink from the little pond like an animal, drinking as much of the ancient water as he could hold, and then he would travel on; and by the next day, the pond would have vanished.

Sometimes, while walking through the dunes, he would see flocks of small colorful birds go flying past—scarlet tanagers, golden warblers, vermilion flycatchers, all flying together—and he would hurry over the dunes, following the direction they had flown. But he had never been able to find water in this manner, and had instead encountered the brief ponds only and always by stumbling chance, like a sleepwalker in a dream awakening to find him- or herself standing ankle-deep in a river.

His company’s drilling rigs pushed deeper into the desert, seemingly scattered here and there, but located according to some master plan of the drillers and geologists, who pursued the deepest reservoirs of oil and gas, probing around the edges; seeking the center always, but with their misses defining the rough perimeters.

Every well drilled brought both mystery and knowledge. A dry hole could be as valuable as a producing well, in that it would help define the limits of the field, and would point the geologists in their next direction.

Between wells, and during bit trips and circulations for washouts, Richard continued to hike the reef country above, and the dunes below. Down in the dunes, on three separate occasions he found old wagon wheels. Two appeared to be the remnants of failed crossings—the bent wooden staves that housed the iron rim were still intact, sand-pitted and varnished by both time and the flow of the dunes (as if, just beneath the crests of the dunes, the wagon had still been traveling); but the third wheel was charred: not burned completely, as it might have been had it been damaged and used for firewood, but burned only in a three-quarter arc, which suggested to Richard that the wagon train had been set aflame while still standing upright in the sand: the echo of one of the ritual massacres that took place regularly beneath the notched visage of the Gap.

The landscape gathered all men, across the ages, as the anguished, hungry, confused blood of man surged this way and that, sloshing around in the soft human vessels as if such blood no more belonged in them than a flock of wild birds, bright birds, would belong in a rusting wire cage.

 

During his crumbling reign, Maximilian, the Austrian ex-archduke who served as emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, reportedly sent wagon trains northward with all his family’s treasure. Maximilian was eventually placed before a firing squad in the spring of 1867, where, before being blindfolded, he handed each of his executioners a single gold coin; but the rest of his immense wealth had vanished, and the stories surrounding its disappearance, and its eventual burial at Castle Gap, carry at least as much authenticity of detail, and faintly corroborative evidence, as any of the other stories of treasure.

There is always an escapee. The gold is placed in a cave and sealed with a charge of dynamite; Indians thereafter massacre all but one survivor, a Negro slave who eludes capture by submerging in the river and breathing through a straw or reed. He returns to the scene in the night, unearths one of the locked strongboxes, smashes it down on a boulder, and a shower of gold and silver coins cascades onto the ground.

He scoops up a few, caches the strongbox, and heads north, where he is captured, charged with murder, and taken to prison. After seven years of saying he knows where the treasure is, he returns with his jailers, traveling all the way down from Ohio, to show them the cache in exchange for his freedom. When they arrive, however, the cache is gone; and rooting in the dust and gravel, all he is able to produce are a few individual coins, entirely unsatisfactory to his captors, and he is returned to jail.

Or the survivor is a one-hundred-year-old woman who had been but a child on the runaway priests’ expedition, the Catholic Cross Cache. In the 1870s, near the end of the old woman’s life, she returns by burro to Castle Gap with her two great-grandchildren, one of whom is ten-year-old Susie, who in the 1900s will go on to become Cat-House Susie, an ex-madam servicing oilfield patrons in the region.

According to Cat-House Susie, her great-grandmother left her and her sister playing in camp and rode the burro up to the summit, and then returned, assuring her great-granddaughters that the treasure was still there, that it had not been disturbed.

Or an old barfly, for the price of a drink, will produce a gold nugget and a tattered map, and the story of having been privy to the deathbed conversation of an outlaw or a priest; and the next day, when the treasure seeker goes out to the mountain (sweat already streaming down his back, not so much from the warmth of sunrise as from the heated palpitations within), he will find a veritable minefield of previously dug holes and cairns and freshly blazed trees, and false graves in which, upon being excavated, no bones are to be found—though no treasure either.

The seeker will wander the mountain for a day or two or three, digging in the sun and resting in the heat of noonday in the shamble of the adobe hut at the base of the mountain, the hut that once served as a rest station for the stage.

(It seemed to Richard, when he came to the landscape, that this hut was the only place on the mountain that had not been disturbed by the shovels and pickaxes of man; and if he were going to look for any of the treasure, or treasures, that is where he would have looked. But he didn’t. He had come looking for other treasures, other things.)

 

There was one woman in particular with whom he spent time, during the period that he was developing the oilfields in the region. Her name was Clarissa, and she had grown up in Odessa, and hated the oil business—hated the familiarity and sameness of it, as well as the landscape—and though she and Richard were only together for about four months, they were good months, and seemed timeless to the lovers.

Clarissa’s hair was as black as a Comanche’s, and her eyes were a pale green. She had thick arching eyebrows that could give one who did not know her the impression of perpetual surprise, and flawless, pale skin. Unlike the other girls she had grown up with (whose skin, by the time they were eighteen, already looked like that of forty-year-olds), Clarissa did not endeavor to spend her every sunlit moment in pursuit of bronzing her skin, but labored to keep it the color it was.

She hated the desert, and loved to soak in water for long stretches—in the bathtub, in the salty rivers, even in warm stock tanks—and she and Richard spent many nights just sitting in the shallows, after having loved; and it seemed to him that her pale body, almost luminous when wet, was a phenomenon in such a harsh country—exceedingly rare, and daily imperiled.

Clarissa had no goal other than getting out: away from West Texas and away from the oil business, which meant away from any and all of Texas. When Richard met her she was working in Odessa as a receptionist for one of the drilling companies. She could smell the odor of crude oil on the men who came and went through the office as a farmer or rancher can smell the scent of horses or cattle in another’s clothes, or on another’s skin; and lying next to Richard, there in the eddies of the salty, muddy river, she could smell it on him, and could taste it on him, though she forgave him, because she in no way loved him, was interested only in the luminescence she sometimes sensed emanating from him. Her own light was hidden, but his seemed at times to leap from him.

There was a place inside him she was drawn to. He would not let her into that place, for she did not love him: but she could sometimes see the glow of it from far within; and for those four months, while he was drilling the various fields, she stayed with him.

The consensus of her high school (she was twenty when Richard met her) and of the community had been that she would go to Hollywood and become an actress or a model. They overestimated her in this regard. She had no desire to work, nor, necessarily, to improve or “better” herself; she wanted only to keep her skin looking the way it did, pale and creamy-soft, night-dreamish, for as long as possible, and to escape the wind and heat.

She sensed intuitively that her power, her physical beauty, lay in this emotional detachment, and ambition of any kind would have jeopardized and perhaps even marred that trance in which the dreamy mental languor was so tied to the physical.

As if everything in her sphere was hypnotized: her viewers, her suitors, the innocence of her skin and beauty, and the ravages of time itself; as if she had momentarily betranced even time’s pendulum. So frightened was she of losing her beauty that she lived almost as if in a state of narcolepsy—seeking, as often as possible, not to let the drying winds of the world rest upon her for more than a moment, and moving from one body of water to the next, and bathing, always bathing.

They spent the nights out near Castle Gap, among the reefs and caverns of the bluff, searching for fossils. It was easier to search for them in the daylight, but Clarissa preferred to be out at night, and so they would walk along the rim with flashlights or lanterns, looking for the most perfect and interesting specimens; chipping them out with rock hammers and collecting them in canvas pouches.

Richard kept most of these for his own interest, a personal collection to be placed along his windowsills, while Clarissa saved hers to sell to the museums, to help raise enough money to leave Odessa and make another life as soon as she could.

“This one is over a million years old,” he would tell her, handing her some intricately spiraled snail, “while this one is only about six hundred thousand.” The smell of ancient lime-chalk both fascinated and repelled her—it was the stuff of geology, the stuff of her hometown—and yet neither could she pull away entirely from him, or the fossils.

They worked in the evenings along the old strand lines, and along the fringed edges of ancient reefs, and then deeper—cracking open vertical seams with rock hammer and crowbar, collecting not just the fossils on the surface, but reaching down into the strata of their predecessors.

Even then, and about a thing so meaningless as a mild hobby, he always kept maps, and they found fossils no one had ever seen or described before, and after a while he was able to predict where they might be able to find a certain kind of fossil; and after a while longer—beginning to follow the journey of his dream as if riding on a small raft, feeling the water take it and lift it, feeling the current’s center—he was able to predict where they would find certain types of fossils that they had not even seen yet, did not even know existed for sure—hypotheses, musings, based on how a certain sea current, and a certain temperature and water chemistry, might sculpt them: the world shaping them like a potter spinning clay, or a woodworker tending a lathe.

Like a magician, he would sketch the imagined creatures in a notepad—gone-away beings that were fantastically ornamented, bold, and multiantennaed—and then, a few nights later, and several feet farther down into the crevice, they would find those very forms.

The impression such discoveries gave both of them was that the world was infinitely varied, and that the ground upon which they walked was studded with a colossus of change below, vertical columns of magnificent fluted architectures and symphonies that no man or woman had ever seen or heard, dreamed or imagined.

Clarissa’s father, in addition to working in oilfield wireline services, was a Baptist preacher who felt that Clarissa’s beauty was more a curse than a blessing, and who would have been appalled at her wanton engagement with evolution: prowling the reefs and cliffs with the tusks of cephalopods and bivalves and the ribbed shells of trilobites kept safely in a pouch between her breasts, and Clarissa believing more and more deeply, with each swing of the hammer, in some story larger and grander than the same but simpler version on which he had raised her.

Their work was dirty, climbing among the slot canyons and brushy draws and smashing apart the old lime reefs that were sometimes so riddled with fossils as to seem like the honeycomb of bees. Their bodies would be covered with grit and dust and chalk—newly cracked, freshly broken Cretaceous odors that had not been in the world for several hundred million years—and their arms would be latticed with scratches from where they had reached down into the stony crevices to extract their treasures, as if dissecting the tiniest and most integral gear-works of some huge and calcified machine that had once been the grandest thing on earth.

They camped down along the river, and would swim back across it—Clarissa was not as strong a swimmer, and used a life jacket—and they would bathe in the eddies. They would ride inner tubes through the rapids, making the long run in the horse-drowning current and then walking back up along the shoreline, picking their way around the salt-encrusted skulls of the last century’s horses.

Sometimes under the cover of so much darkness it would feel to both of them as if all the sky above had already been transformed into the strata of time—that they were already sealed beneath such a sky, as if below so many trillions of tons of stone—and that at any moment their movements would cease forever and they would be stranded there with the horses’ heads, caught ankle- or knee-deep in the mire. Like the children they had been not long ago, they would ride the inner tubes down the moon-bright current, the river bright as magma, again and again, until they were both clean and exhausted, or as clean as they could get, bathing in a salt river.

They would sleep beside the crossing on air mattresses, lulled by the sound of the river. On clear nights, they could hear (and sometimes feel trembling within the earth) the ceaseless throb and clatter of the faraway rigs, as the drillers sought to reach ever deeper, focused on only one thing, and chasing that one thing, the shape of it like the outline of a fleeing animal, hounding it, as if believing like blind converts that that one thing had more significance than any other, and that there was nothing else of comparable worth in the world; or, most blindly of all, that there might truly one day be an end to their searching, and a stanching of their hunger.

Clarissa rarely slept, there on the air mattress. She would lie awake watching the stars while Richard slept, and she would wait. When she swam she kept her hair up in a bun, to keep the salt in the river from damaging it, and only the hair at the nape of her neck would get damp.

On the riverbank, she would lie very still, conscious of the need to conserve herself—her energy, and her passions—sensing that if she was to escape Odessa successfully and forever, she would have to do so, despite her great beauty, by somehow staying beneath the world’s, or time’s, notice. To wait, and wait, until a gate or door opened.

She did not even know what the door looked like, nor certainly to where it led: only that it had not yet opened, and she felt the need to wait, as if sleeping.

 

Richard would awaken shortly after dawn, on those mornings when they were able to spend the night out along the river—when his work did not call him back to the oilfields that next day, for one rare reason or another—and Clarissa would already be sitting up, just watching him, a sheet drawn around her shoulders, as if even the first pink light of day might somehow be able to burn her fair skin.

He would feel himself being studied, and would rise and embrace her. They would make love on the sand, the sheet over his back above her for protection against the sun, like a billowing tent—the day’s dry breezes already beginning—and then he would make a driftwood cookfire, and would catch and fry a catfish for his breakfast, and make eggs and bacon for hers.

She would eat nothing that came from so wild and rank a place as the river, though she enjoyed with a perfect mix of distaste and longing watching him hunker naked by the fire, cock hanging down to the sand, spiny gutted catfish dipped in batter and leaning out over the skillet head and tail, Richard using a sock as a hot pad for the iron skillet, so that in that first pale light, pink turning already to copper, the scene could have been from a hundred or two hundred years ago, a nomadic Comanche or Apache.

After breakfast, Clarissa would paint her body completely with zinc oxide, as would Richard, and they would go walking in the desert, naked save for their sandals, hats, and sunglasses.

This was the most dangerous thing she did; the most dangerous thing she would ever do. She could feel the heat trying to burn through the crust of her white shell. She carried the tube of zinc with her and stopped to reapply it whenever a trickle of sweat revealed even the thinnest trace of flesh, and Richard carried a canteen on a strap slung over his shoulder.

On they marched, like ghosts reanimated, following the sensual hills of the dunes, searching for nothing, only wandering; and knowing that if they got lost, or ran out of water, they would die, and die horribly.

In the dazzling heat and blowtorch winds, their zinc coatings baked and continuously cracked and fell off in patches, so that they kept having to stop and mend each other’s gaps, as if repairing chinks in armor. Sand and grit and even husks of insect shells and stray feathers and the fur of jackrabbits and the occasional wind-tossed glittering scales of skeletal fish and reptiles would become affixed to the sweating sludge of their whitened, protective coating, so that it might have seemed that they themselves were evolving, and at a pace approaching light-speed, into some melded, awkward admixture of landscape: a crude experiment, and reeling, lost, frantic.

None of these emotions were in them, however, when they were in the dunes. They took their time, gave themselves over to following the curious, shifting slopes as they might follow behind a herd of circus elephants, or camels, or some other odd and extravagant grouping; and they did not panic.

Occasionally they would happen upon the little temporary oases, the just-appeared ponds of wind-rippled, sparkling water, once again attended to by birds, and sometimes by coyotes and kit foxes; and again, they would crouch on their hands and knees at water’s edge, or hunker, and drink from the lens of water like wild animals (the colorful birds swirling overhead), or they would drink with cupped hands, would let the cold water run down their arms, and would sprinkle the water on the backs of each other’s necks and faces: and then, reapplying even more zinc oxide, they would turn back, heading for the wide salty vein of the Pecos.

And once back in their camp, they would bathe in that salty river. They would dress in cool long-sleeved shirts and light cotton pants and drive back to Odessa, feeling free and glorious to be shed of the old fur-and-grit paste-skin that had become like a part of themselves; and on the drive back, bleary-eyed, they would drink a gallon of fresh water, drinking straight from a plastic jug.

Once back in town, Clarissa would sleep for the rest of the day and that night, and almost all of the next day as well, so drained would she be from the sojourn and its strange challenges; and it would not be until the next day that she would use her parents’ car to take the fossils she had collected all the way to Austin, a five-hour drive each way, to sell to a museum there, lying about the provenance of the discovery, saying only that she had found them in cardboard boxes upon cleaning out the estate of her grandfather.

She would put the money in an Austin bank. She wasn’t sure how much she would need to go to wherever she was going, nor when or where that would be. In her first two months with Richard she had made almost $10,000, collecting and selling fossils, but she did not think that would be nearly enough. It would have helped to know where she wanted to go or what she wanted to do, but the door simply had not opened.

She was certain that it would. It never occurred to her that it might not. And there was never a gathering of people—an office party in Odessa, a routine shopping trip, a Sunday morning in church—when, if a real door opened, her eyes did not turn to that door, to see who or what might be entering.

 

There was another collector in the region, a Mr. Herbert Mix, an elderly man who had lost a leg to diabetes and who had once been enraptured with the search for the various caches of gold.

Before his leg had been taken, Mix had evidenced a hunger not only for the gold itself, nor its legends and lores, but for everything else that might have been peripherally associated with it. Any trace of iron or steel he happened across in his diggings, or any other human artifact, he was compelled to save. He had begun searching for the treasure when he was seven; he was now seventy-four, and had lost his leg only ten years before. Over the years he had established a substantial hoard, one that filled numerous adobe huts in town.

Old horseshoes, knife blades, wagon wheels, clay pots, human skeletons: anything was fair game, his hunger was nondirectional and unquenchable, and he hauled it all home, affixed an index card to each item stating the date and location of when and where it had been found, along with a brief narration of what Mix perceived to have been the circumstances of its deposition.

Always lurid, his descriptions confirmed without fail his suspicions that there had never been an arrowhead that had not pierced human flesh, nor any skeleton that had perished under any circumstance save for a massacre or a sun-maddened wandering. The most intricate trinkets—a single rusted link of chain—were physical proof of the Emperor Maximilian’s exiled wanderings. Here, he had camped for the night, with only half a day’s lead on his pursuers, who intended to bring him back to Mexico to execute him for, among other things, having failed their expectations; here, this shard of pottery, was where Coronado sat with the chief of the Zuñis and informed him that the Zuñis were now subjects of the nation of Spain. Here, this fragment, was where the chief rose to his feet, broke the clay dish over his knee, and stalked off, vowing to make war upon the white man “until the ocean turned to stone again.” This tattered songbook, this hymnal, could only have belonged to the wife of the first pastor in the county, the pastor who had received the deathbed confessions of so many, and who, in turn, prior to breathing his last, murmured more treasure clues, scrambled, to his wife . . .

It was all there, in little dusty earthen-floored storage sheds out back off the main streets of Odessa, the blood-and-guts matrix of his dreams, as well as the dreams of so many others; and, enthusiastically quantified and cataloged, it was for him as irrefutable as any history book.

Mix opened a museum that showcased the trappings and residues of the treasures, if not the treasures themselves. He catered to the lonely and the unfulfilled; and in addition, to the long tables of mementos he kept on display in an abandoned garage—charging fifty cents per head to walk in and take refuge from the heat of the day (the eternal wind slinging sand against the curved metal roof of the garage, which had the shape and cavernous sounds of an airplane hangar), and charging a dollar for those who wanted to touch.

Horseshoes, square nails, old coffee cans, and other refuse from the hundreds of searchers earlier in the century: nothing was sacred, and though Mix was unwilling to part with any of the hundreds of human skulls he’d accumulated over the decades, he was not above selling various lesser body parts—a vertebra, a phalange, or even a pelvic bone—to a motivated buyer.

In the yard behind his house, amongst the weeds, were enough rusting and rotting wagon-train wheels to supply three cavalries across five centuries. It had long been said that a person could not safely ride a horse through the dunes, because one of the horse’s hoofs would sooner or later snag on one of the thousands of abandoned wagon wheels; and until about the 1930s and ’40s, until Herbert Mix’s insatiable appetite had been unleashed fully upon the landscape, that had been true.

In addition to selling wagon wheels to decorate the front-gate entrances of ranches and ranchettes, he sold pickaxes and canteens, tents and army cots, to would-be searchers; and he had his own maps for sale too, diagrams of the position and orientation of what he perceived to be some of the more significant of his discoveries: and from those orientations he had offered interpretations.

He rented these maps out to novice prospectors for hard cash as well as a contractual agreement that stipulated a fifty-fifty split of any bounty that was found. And though Mix could rarely any longer get into the mountains, he offered himself as a consultant, and for a fee could be persuaded to haul himself up onto a midget burro and, beneath a pink or purple parasol gotten for $1.99 at the department store, head laboriously up into the mountains or out into the desert with one of a new generation of seekers, sipping whiskey and pointing out places to dig, while ruminating upon and interpreting each spadeful of dirt.

Across the span of over half a century of his disease, he made a lot of money; not as much, perhaps, as he might have been able to produce from the liquidation of a single strongbox of bullion, but enough—more than enough, had he lived prudently, conservatively, moderately. And in a cautious, considered manner, he might have been able to summon, across time, some approximate and perhaps satisfactory semblance of the wealth not from any discovery of the treasure itself, but simply from the sustained dream of it.

He failed in prudence, however. He was unable to restrain his appetite, nor the terrifying euphoria he would sometimes feel, midmeal, when he first realized that, despite prodigious consumption, enough would never be enough.

And so he had not only sold, he had bought. His goal was to sell the unworthy, the duplicated, and the common; but because it all had value in his eyes, he was rarely able to refrain from purchasing the dregs of memorabilia that came sweeping through his museum, brought there by fellow treasure seekers like the cracked and salt-corroded leavings of some reverse tide, running always counter to his own.

No sooner had he closed a sale on a pickax, or a time-pitted cannonball, than some wayfaring derelict would come in with yet another skull, or a sun-mottled medicine vial, or a bird-point arrowhead with the cedar arrow-shaft still attached, wanting to trade it for whiskey money. He had once bought a saber for four hundred dollars; a conquistador’s helmet for seven hundred. A rust-gutted six-shooter for a hundred dollars; an odd-shaped stone with an etching on it—perhaps authentic, perhaps not—for two hundred. Even tattered articles of clothing—a faded straw hat, a pair of sand-blown chaps stiff as the sun-dried hide of some bone-bleached steer; a salt-crusted boot—were not beyond his desire.

He spent what he had, for the tide was always coming in.

Always, the skulls were what intrigued him the most. In the early days of his obsession, he had been enamored with the entire skeletal carriage; but as he aged, and then even more so as he shed one of his own legs, it became only the skulls that held interest for him: and of those skulls, his favorite part was the upper; the smooth, boulder-rounded curve of sutured cranium, repository of an infinity of gone-by senses, of sparkling cells of memory now dried to dust and blown forgotten back into the world, leaving behind only the curious whorls of geometry, the empty skull as smooth and lifeless as the inner sweep of a wave-polished, long-vacant conch shell or some other calcified vessel, like the specimens held up to one’s ear in childhood in order to hear the echo of the sea’s roar.

The other, lesser skeletal parts he kept piled about in his weedy backyard. At first he had attempted to arrange and catalog them, with painted reference numbers corresponding to their detached headpieces, but over the years he abandoned that practice and now merely stacked them into one general boneyard.

Before the physical limitations of his age and his condition had caught up with him, he had rented a great balloon-tired tractor, and with a deep-toothed harrow had combed the troughs between the dunes with the patience of a deep-sea fisherman, keenly attuned beyond the throttled tremblings of the tractor to the dull snag and clink of iron tooth finding rounded bone; and when he felt or sensed such interruption, he would throw the tractor into neutral and hop down and trot out through the warm sand to go gather up his discovery: examining it eagerly, searching for clues to the wounds of battle.

Despite the intensity of his hoarding, his remained always an amateur’s interest, and he was never able to ascertain any ethnicity of the skulls, nor sex, nor age. He simply gathered them, like pumpkins, and dropped each one into a burlap bag that he kept hanging from the rear fender of the tractor.

Other times he would not feel the harrow’s tug, but would ride for unknown stretches of time as if hypnotized by some lulling combination of the tractor’s idle and purr, and by the sight of the dunes all around him like waves, and by the heat, and by the brightness. Crossing-over seagulls, traveling from the Gulf Coast to some inland lake—Yellowstone, farther north, or the Great Salt Lake, or even the smaller Juan Cordona Lake—would see the tractor trawling below, and from habit would veer and follow it for a while, as they did with the shrimpers’ boats at sea, or the threshers tilling the wheat fields farther north, churning up worms and insects.

But there was nothing for them below but dry sand and the occasional skull or arm bone (the radius or ulna sometimes crooking up from the sand in the precise position of a swimmer executing a perfect crawl-stroke, as if having labored all this time to come back up from the depths).

In his reverie, Herbert Mix would travel on for some great distance, until some stray thought or image finally awakened him; and he would look back and see, in the long furrowed row behind him, a wealth of risen skulls, shining like melons in the sunlight, and the gulls circling; and again he would shut his tractor off, and throw the burlap bag over his shoulder, and wander back into the desert to gather time’s harvest, retracing the furrows of his path.

The bag would grow heavy as he wandered that long furrow, and he would sometimes be made uneasy by the thought and then the belief, as the heft of the bag grew greater and the skulls clanked and rattled, that he was not so much walking on sand as he was on skulls; that were the teeth on his harrow longer, they would find even more skulls; that the world was nothing but skulls, and a tangle of skeletons, all the way down—that even the mountains themselves were but a thin patina of earth drawn taut across that tangled assemblage—and when he turned to look back at his tractor, as if for reassurance that he was still in this world, he would be further discomforted by the distance he had traveled, without having realized it.

The tractor would be only a shining glint in the faraway blending of haze and dune, barely even identifiable as an artifact of man, and Mix would be overcome with loneliness; but still, he would turn around and press on, harvesting his skulls, for it was less frightening for him to pretend that the feeling was not real, than to acknowledge it, and to turn in fear and loneliness back to the tractor.

Like a coward as well as a stoic, he pushed on. Ravenous. A slight pain in his leg, twenty years before the fact, as he wandered the bone fields collecting the legs of those he had never known.

 

A miracle had happened to Herbert Mix only once, and in many ways his life was poorer for it rather than richer, for it had been so many years since the phenomenon had revealed itself, and so many years had he spent in the dunes awaiting expectation of others like it, that his waiting had turned finally into disappointment, and the disappointment to frustration.

He had seen the phenomenon when he was forty years old. He was out prowling the dunes, as he often did, walking with a backpack and compass, ribbons and long willow poles. A shovel and a sack lunch; a straw hat. Anything of interest that he came across that would fit into the pack, he would load into it before continuing on his way; and anything that was too bulky or heavy, he would do his best to mark on the map, and would drive a willow pole into the sand, affixing bright pink and blue ribbons to the top of the pole like prayer flags, and would hope that the dunes would not change so much by the time he returned.

The miracle had occurred on the summer solstice. Such an event was of no special import to Herbert Mix, other than the fact that the day would be long, and, still being in relatively good health, he intended to travel a long way, to utilize the fullness of the day.

He had been traveling already for half the day—trudging bronze-skinned beneath the sun—when he crested a tall dune and looked down and saw, in the opposing and balanced wind-scalloped trough on the back side of the dune, the most astounding sight: what he took at first to be a modern-day wagon train, complete with gaunt horses and gaunt travelers, laboring to get the mired wagon back on track.

Mix’s eyes blurred in the wind, and his heart froze with terror, as in that first moment his eyes tried to inform his brain of the impossible: that these lost travelers were still wandering from the last century; that time had stranded them—had braided around them, leaving them untouched.

He stood petrified on the ridge, the ribbons on his flags flapping in the wind like the pendants of some child playing conquistador; and it was some time before the chill in his heart subsided and his true vision returned to him, so that he was able to see that the wagon train was not captured by ghosts but was simply the remains of the past, little touched and well preserved.

He hurried down into the basin with all the greed and astonishment of any seeker. Already the swirls and back currents of wind were bringing a fine flashing sift of sand into the basin, as when rising waters seek to fill a low spot. He hurried over to the wagon train and marveled at the story before him, examined all the parts of it with his hands, still not daring to believe what he was seeing.

There were but two huge horses in the traces: all bones, now, and crumpled to their keels in various states of collapse. Mix got the impression they were down on their knees, pawing for water, and in the back of the wagon (canvas top long gone, but hooped ribs still intact) lay a skeleton in perfect grinning repose; not as if he had been fever-wracked at the point in time when the wagon had finally gotten bogged down in the sand, and not as if he had already been dead at that point, so that it was merely his lifeless and soulless body that the wagon had been transporting (why else had he not gotten out to try to help, nor even stirred?), but instead as if he had been enjoying everything so immensely—the sickness, the bouncing ride, and then the agony of getting stuck yet again; and enjoying, above all, the waterless, blazing heat—that he had been unwilling to bestir himself from this position of ecstasy.

The rider’s hands lay clasped across his chest. His gnarled and rodent-chewed boots were still on the remains of his feet, as if he had intended to lie down for only a little while; as if he had intended, once the euphoria had passed, to get back up and go out and help.

It was the figure kneeling at the right rear axle that intrigued Mix the most. She, too, still had her boots on, and her hat, still sand-filled, had not traveled far from her bright shining head. Her blouse or shirt was long gone—scraps of that fabric shredded by time and used in the lining of the nests of generations of mice and birds—though her skirt, evidently of a hide material, was still partially intact, tattered but drawn taut around her, as if it had been her skin, not another animal’s, all along.

The woman had had straight long reddish-brown hair—hanks of it still lay attached to the hat, and on the quilt on which she seemed only to be resting—and to Herbert Mix’s great horror and discomfort, he found himself aroused. As if the woman were somehow still living. As if time had vanished, or never occurred. As if the elegant shapes and suppleness of flesh were but a layer of clothing, obscuring or covering something even more beautiful, stark, and vital.

He shook these thoughts from his head and moved a step closer. The woman was leaning against the stuck wheel, collapsed against it as if praying—still praying—and Herbert Mix took out his shovel and dug cautiously but easily around the wheel.

At its base he found more quilt.

The sand was still sifting into the newly uncovered basin, like that which runs through an hourglass. Herbert Mix went over to the left rear wheel and began digging, and found another quilt; and under each front wheel, more quilts.

It was obvious to him what had happened. The iron wheels had been just a little too narrow, and the wagon a little too heavy (perhaps if the man had been able to get out and walk—had he been a big man—or even been able to help push, things might have been different; perhaps, perhaps), and the horses were too tired to continue to pull the heavy load.

The woman had been pushing them on, three feet at a time, making the journey easier for them, if even only slightly, by positioning the quilts under each wheel, so that it was for the horses as if they were pulling across that quilted surface, rather than plowing so deeply—muscles quivering; sweat pouring from their huge bodies, and not a sip of water for miles ahead—and finally, the heat had killed one of them, horse or woman first, Mix couldn’t tell.

Perhaps when the horses went down, it was at that point that the woman had leaned her head for the last time against the stuck wagon wheel.

There were twin oaken water barrels mounted upright on the back of the wagon, and out of morbid curiosity, Herbert Mix pried open the lids and looked inside—Still empty, he thought, fingering the heft of his own canteen.

He gave the wagon a cursory search for any possible bullion—what but treasure, he wondered, could have inspired such ferocious and dogged wandering?—and finding nothing of real worth—an ancient cracked Bible, pages fluttering back and forth in the wind as if some unseen reader was furiously scanning for some certain passage only dimly remembered—Herbert Mix pondered and debated on what to fill his pack with, knowing (the rising sand was up over his calves now; had risen to the kneeling woman’s wind-sharpened haunches) that when he returned, all would be vanished—knowing that trough would become ridge, and ridge, trough.

In the end, he settled for the mundane, the seemingly trivial: a pair of reading glasses, a pocket watch, a diary that he would later examine for clues to treasure, though there were none. An old Dutch oven; plates, knives, forks. The wind-whipped Bible, if only to cease its furious movements.

Nothing from the man or woman—not even their skulls—but from the back of the wagon, a riding saddle, still in tolerable condition, one that might possibly be restored. His mind was already racing, thinking ahead to the text he would put on the index cards. Surely they had been headed to the gold fields in California, if not already on their way back. What else was there?

He turned and stared back in the direction from which they had come.

From all the trouble they’d been having—laying down those quilts, lunging through the sand three feet at a time, stopping to pull the quilts out, dig under the wheels, clawing with bloodied hands, laying them down again—it seemed certain that they must have jettisoned any tonnage of gold elsewhere; and it was one of the few moments of truth in Herbert Mix’s life, one of the few times he was ever given pause to realize how vast the desert really was, and what tiny space such treasure might truly occupy.

The wind continued to carve funnels of sand out from beneath the cornice: cutting it lower and lower, and as the lip of the undercut cornice fell, re-formed, and fell again—moving ever closer to the scene below, like some stalking giant—Herbert Mix set about the planting of his flags; scrambled with drowning gold-lust up the sand slope, sinking to his knees under the weight of his useless bounty. He quickly began setting the poles along the windward rim of the basin, even as that rim continued to be scalloped downward.

Drenched in sweat, he succeeded in ringing the caldera with eight of his poles before the skeletons had disappeared beneath the sand, not like victims but like divers choosing to descend. Mix watched as the sand dimpled in waves that showed only vaguely their sleeping shapes below, and then nothing: the wagon sinking too in that manner, as if it was the weight of the wagon, the thing to which they clung, that was pulling them down, and that if only they could have released themselves from it, they might have been borne back up to the surface.

His poles were leaning and then toppling as the ridge advanced across the basin, again like something walking; and as the level of the ridge lowered itself to meet the rising trough of filling sand, the sight gave him the most disorienting feeling—as if he were surfing; and without his moving, it seemed nonetheless that he was moving, riding some immense and powerful wave: and he knelt there, grit stuck to his sweating body, skin broiling, lungs heaving.

It was not until the ridge had leveled itself completely with the trough, with the pioneers suddenly beneath that astounding burden, that Herbert Mix realized he was sinking, descending into a new sandy basin much as a doodlebug falls prey to the ant-lion’s simple but cunning trap of gravity.

Fighting the shifting substrate, he labored halfheartedly up the new ridge, the one that seemed to be walking away from him, and began gathering his fallen flags. He would place them elsewhere in the desert on his walk out—planting them in what he hoped would be more trustworthy locations, near the scarce patches of semipermanent willow, saltbush, and tumbleweed; and he would attempt, with his drunk-man’s trudging stagger, to measure approximate distances, in leagues and varas, while sketching a crude map of his backtrack: but he knew even as he paused to construct these tiny markers that there was no hope, that the miracle was as good as gone, and in some strange way more ungraspable now for having been seen and lost than had it been only imagined and not yet found.

The physical toll would rock him as nothing ever had before. A hundred and then a thousand times that day—he had gone too far—he knew that he should lay down the burden of his foolish pack and focus instead simply on getting out alive. He could feel the tender organs inside his pale skin, sheathed only in thin muscle, beginning to bake inside his body, could feel the blood soup that bathed the fragile meninges of his brain beginning to simmer, and as he trudged on, he dreamed of wading through reeds into the warm shallow water of a stock tank, the mud soft between his toes, and lying back then and floating on the surface of that water.

After that, he imagined nothing, only pushed on, seized with some implacable and uncalmable ferocity—not even greed, but some primal essence of hunger, which surprised him, aware as he was of the hugeness of his need.

The glistening sweat kept leaping from him, evaporating quickly, until he had no more to give, but still he struggled on, tumbling and falling, his pack full of treasures, or things that might have once been associated with treasures.

He barely made it back out. He hauled the sledge of his pack up one dune after another. There was no clear path out, no trail, and each mistake or inefficient choice seemed to cost him tenfold.

Twice he had gone into fibrillation, his body so dehydrated as to venture over into the territory of cardiac arrest and sunstroke, and he had lain down the last time, barely able to breathe—his lungs and breath quivering staccato now, within sight of the river, though he had not been able to make himself rise.

He lay there, chest pounding and breath racing, and stared at the not-too-distant and extraordinarily familiar notch of Castle Gap, and Horsehead Crossing below.

He was close enough to smell it. A pair of ravens drifted in the distance, black against the blue sky of summer. Had it been earlier in the day, he would have lain there and baked to death. As it was, dusk rescued him after only a couple of hours, and when he awoke again it was evening and the desert stars were out, and he was still lying on his side and looking at them upside down, so that they seemed to be the lights of some endless civilization far below.

He did not have the strength to carry his pack any farther—each time he tried to stand, his heart leapt with the fright of a trapped wild animal—but he was able to drag it down the hill to the river, and to the river’s road where his jeep was waiting.

And such was his weakness when he got there that he was unable to lift the pack into the jeep, but had to unload it, item by item—again lifting out the most mundane objects with the greatest reverence.

He managed to haul his cracked and fried body up into the familiar seat of the jeep, but was too addled to take the key from the ashtray where he kept it stored. He sat there staring at the ashtray for the longest time.

He was comforted just to know that the key was close, that he had made it all the way to within sight of it, or to within sight of the place where it was kept, even if he could not close that final distance, and he fell asleep—or into some chasm deeper than sleep but not all the way into unconsciousness, some floating, pre-embryonic place, his mind unmade and unformed and instead simply a tangled mass of electrical synapses emitting low and random signals—and it was not until dawn the next day that his life returned to him with any semblance of function.

He drove on into town, slowly; had one glass of water, and then a second, drinking it carefully.

He lay down on his bed—his chest was bruised purple from the severity with which his runaway heart had pounded—and he slept for thirty-six hours, rising only once to use the bathroom and drink another quart of water.

For a week, every part of his body felt as if it had been beaten with a wooden club, and for the rest of his life, his kidneys ached whenever he encountered any kind of physical stress; and he was certain it was because of that one ordeal that he eventually lost his leg.

But his treasures! They occupied a special place in his museum—the Ghost Wagon Train wing of the garage—and though he went out again and again looking for the man and the woman, he never saw them again; and in this regard, across the years—or so he told himself—the value of his treasures from that day grew and grew: the old Dutch oven, the broken saucer, the rusting knife blade, the Bible, the arrowhead with spear shaft still attached. That was all there was. That was all there would ever be.

He might as well have traveled to the moon. And to his credit, he did not put those items up for sale.